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Shift in Welfare Policy Draws G.O.P. Protests

WASHINGTON — A move by the Obama administration to give states more latitude in running federal welfare-to-work programs has set off a firestorm among Republicans, who say it undercuts the work requirements set forth in the 1996 overhaul of welfare policy.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that it would grant states waivers to experiment with how they administer the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which distributes aid to the poorest Americans while they look for work.

The directive results from a broader effort by the Obama administration to peel back unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and allow states to spend federal money more efficiently. But Republicans, who characterize the move as a power grab by the executive branch, have criticized the waivers, saying they prove that the president and Democrats support providing welfare money without encouraging the recipients to find work.

In a letter last week addressed to Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Representative Dave Camp of Michigan called the waiver directive “deeply flawed.”

“Simply put, if Congress had intended to allow waivers of TANF work requirements, it would have said so in the statute,” they wrote.

The White House said Tuesday that the Health and Human Services Department had told the two lawmakers that a response to their letter was being prepared.

Republicans’ discontent might be as much a function of policy disagreement as it is a reflection of disappointment with the process. Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, said some Republicans thought that the health department “violated the spirit of the law, and they did it in a way that was very aggressive.”

“Republicans are the party of state flexibility,” Mr. Haskins said, “but now, suddenly, Republicans are opposed to flexibility because they think they have the work standards just right. They don’t trust Democrats to make it work.”

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program is derived from welfare legislation in 1996, which created it as a block grant to states. In the fiscal year 2011, more than 4.4 million people in more than 1.8 million families nationwide were enrolled in the program, which received more than $20.8 billion in federal money.

What is happening now is a result of a presidential memo in February 2011 that urged executive departments and agencies to ask states for ideas on how to make the federal government more nimble. As the Health and Human Services Department began to solicit suggestions, a handful of states complained about being burdened by the welfare program’s paperwork and reporting requirements.

“We need state workers spending less time filling out data reports and more time helping parents find employment,” George Sheldon, the acting assistant secretary in the department’s Administration for Children and Families, wrote in a blog post last week.

On the same day that the department announced that it would allow waivers, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy organization, posted an article on its Web site that said the directive would “gut” the welfare law, and called into question the motives of the department.

“You can see they clearly want to keep this low key, but they will incrementally essentially rescind each piece of this law and introduce a new system,” said Robert Rector, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation who was a co-author of the article.

This week Republican politicians echoed that message. The House speaker, John A. Boehner, called the department’s directive “a partisan disgrace.” Appearing on the television program “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday, Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, called the waivers “a trap.”

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, also entered the fray, saying that President Obama “wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare.”

“The president’s action is completely misdirected,” Mr. Romney said in a statement. “Work is a dignified endeavor, and the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.”

At the state level, the issue does not fall so clearly along party lines. Of the five states that have so far expressed interest in receiving waivers, two of them, Utah and Nevada, have Republican governors. The other states are California, Connecticut and Minnesota, according to the Health and Human Services Department.

State support of waivers is not a new phenomenon. In 2005, 29 Republican governors, including Mr. Romney and Mr. Huckabee, asked Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, for more “flexibility to manage their TANF programs and effectively serve low-income populations.”

“Increased waiver authority, allowable work activities, availability of partial work credit and the ability to coordinate state programs are all important aspects of moving recipients from welfare to work,” the letter read.

Peter B. Edelman, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy, called Republican opposition to the waivers “totally ridiculous.”

“This is an advisory that is all about making it easier to get a job, which I thought is what the Republicans wanted,” Mr. Edelman said. “To say that this is somehow against the concept of TANF is bizarre, because what we have here are restrictions that Congress enacted that, on the ground, make it harder to get from here to there.”

Even with waivers, some states’ experimentation with welfare will probably be sharply limited by constricted budgets.

A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2012, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Shift in Welfare Policy Draws G.O.P. Protests. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe